China’s scientific supremacy shifting balance of power. By Caroline Wagner.

By at least one measure, China now leads the world in producing high-quality science. My research shows that Chinese scholars now publish a larger fraction of the top 1% most cited scientific papers globally than scientists from any other country. …

China’s recent ascendancy results from years of governmental policy aiming to be tops in science and technology. …

Since 2000, China has sent an estimated 5.2 million students and scholars to study abroad. The majority of them studied science or engineering. Many of these students remained where they studied, but an increasing number return to China to work in well-resourced laboratories and high-tech companies.

Today, China is second only to the US in how much it spends on science and technology. Chinese universities now produce the largest number of engineering PhDs in the world, and the quality of Chinese universities has dramatically improved in recent years. …

For many years, researchers in the West wrote off Chinese research as low quality and often as simply imitating research from the US and Europe. During the 2000s and 2010s, much of the work coming from China did not receive significant attention from the global scientific community.

But as China has continued to invest in science, I began to wonder whether the explosion in the quantity of research was accompanied by improving quality. …

Our research also found that Chinese research was surprisingly novel and creative — and not simply copying western researchers. To measure this, we looked at the mix of disciplines referenced in scientific papers. The more diverse and varied the referenced research was in a single paper, the more interdisciplinary and novel we considered the work. We found Chinese research to be as innovative as other top performing countries.

In the West, who wants to be an engineer or scientist? Finance and legal is where the big money and status is.

Research –> weapons –> power.